Shadows are as interesting as the light. Chiaroscuro is a term used in photography, as well as cinema and painting, that literally means “light-dark” and originates from the Italian Renaissance. The shadows help define the image, making the two dimensional appear three dimensional.
The idea for this shoot was to have the model, Saori, emerging into the light from the shadows. To get that effect, I used a black seamless background, making sure that the key light did not spill onto it by keeping them well-separated. I started with a large gridded softbox close to Saori, on camera right to light the portraits and close-ups, highlighting Julia’s makeup work. By moving the softbox in very close, the light falls off quickly so the opposite side of her face is quite a bit darker than the side with the light. To control the shadow’s darkness I used a large white foamcore panel and a silver disk reflector for fill light.
For the full body shots, I really wanted to get the shadowy look, so I used a more focused light – a gridded strobe on a boom in front and above Saori. For an interesting background, I put a fog machine and another strobe to backlight the smoke/fog behind Saori. For some of the shots, I used a blue gel on the strobe to make a blue smoke effect. With this set-up, Saori’s face was well lit and her body gradually became darker, fading into blackness.
Post-processing was done with Lightroom 3.3 and Photoshop CS5.
Credits: Inspired modelling by Saori Sloan
Beautiful peacock themed makeup by Julia Lockley
It’s October and summer is long gone in Vancouver, but here are some reminders of the warmth of summer from a photoshoot that I did in July. The shoot featured bright colours, sunglasses and wigs and the beautiful and talented models Sandra and Charr with makeup and hair by Rhi Yee.
I also used the opportunity to test out my Olympus E-30′s multiple exposure mode:
The multiple exposure mode gave some pretty cool images, so I will be doing more of them in future shoots!
Here’s a gallery with more images from the shoot if you want to check them out.
Cinemagraphs are a combination of video and still photography, usually more of a photograph with some motion. The term cinemagraph was coined by Jamie Beck and Kevin Berg. Cinemagraphs are actually animated gifs, which have been around for a long time, but they have a cinematic quality and retain the feel of a photograph.
A photographer friend of mine, Jenny Chen, was visting Vancouver so we decided to collaborate on a photoshoot and use the opportunity to try to create some cinemagraphs. It was the first time either of us had tried this. I followed an excellent video tutorial, which demonstrates how to create cinemagraphs using Photoshop CS5 Extended.
Here are some photos featuring glitter eye makeup by makeup artist Tessa Mitz, and models Oksana Bach and ScarlettS. We started the shoot in the studio using a couple different hand painted muslin backgrounds. One was a European-looking village scene and the other was a moonlit beach. I wasn’t sure if these would look too cheesy, but I think they worked and gave a different look than a seamless paper background. I’m always interested in different ideas for studio backgrounds!
After the studio session, we moved to a small Vancouver park to finish the shoot. A lot of my photography is done in the studio, so it was great to have the opportunity to do an outdoor location shoot with natural light.
Here’s a slideshow with Scarlett’s photos:
The music for both the videos is by Remote Spaces from the “Silo” album.
I love these animated gifs and wanted to try something like that myself. I did a photoshoot a couple of months ago with model Kristina and used a fog machine to create a misty background. It would be cool to show the mist swirling around in a short animated gif. The original photo had some mist, but I wanted to add some more in Photoshop and then animate it.
Original:
Model Kristina - Original Photo
Animated:
Kristina Fog Animation
Photoshop CS5
Level of difficulty: Intermediate. You should be familiar with working with layers, resizing images and using the warp tool.
Create the mist layers:
(Click on the screen shots to zoom)
Create a blank layer above the edited/retouched photo
Paint some mist on the blank layer & name the layer Mist 1. I used these mist brushes by SpiritSighs.
Mist Brushes
Copy the layer, name it Mist 2 and warp it using Edit => Transform => Warp. You can warp the mist to make it look like it has drifted around.
Copy the warped layer and repeat with another warp (Mist 3).
Copy the above layer and warp it again (Mist 4). You will now have the original image plus four mist layers above it. Click on Fig. 1 to expand.
Fig. 1 Layer palette with mist layers
Create the Animation Frames:
Select the 5 layers and open the animation window (Window => animation – Fig. 2). Make sure you are in frame view (Fig. 3).
Fig. 2 Opening the Animation Window
Fig. 3 Animation window in frame view
Click on the frame and duplicate it by dragging it to the new frame icon. Repeat this four times to give a total of 5 frames (Fig. 4 & 5).
Fig. 4 Duplicating the frame
Fig. 5 Duplicating the frame
Click on the first frame. Go to the layers panel and make only the base layer (retouch) visible (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6 Click on the eye to hide, click again to reveal layer
Click on the second frame and make the retouch layer on the Mist 1 layer visible using the layers panel
Click on the third frame and make the base layer & the Mist 2 layer visible.
Click on the fourth frame and make the base layer & the Mist 3 layer visible
Click on the fifth frame & make the base layer & the Mist 4 layer visible
Select all 5 frames by clicking on the first and Shift-Clicking on the last one.
Change the frame delay time to 0.1 (Fig. 7) You can try different timings depending on what works best for your project.
Fig. 7 Change frame delay
Tween the animation to make it run more smoothly
Click on the first frame and Shift-click on the second frame
Go to the animation menu and choose Tween… (Fig.
Fig. 8 Animation Menu
Enter 10 in the “frames to add box” and select all layers, and position & opacity (Fig. 9)
Fig. 9 Tween Dialog Box
Select frames 12 & 13 and repeat the Tween for these two frames. Repeat this for frames 23 & 24 and 34 & 35 (See Fig. 10)
Fig. 10 Tweening Frames
Duplicate the last frame (45) and move it to the front
Tween the first and second frames as before. This makes the animation smoothly cycle back to the beginning.
Make sure the repeat mode is “Forever”
Save everything!
Check it out – when you press the play button you will have a pretty smooth animation!
Save the animated gif
Resize the image to the size that you want (I used a height of 375 pixels because it gave me a file size under 2 MB). Go to Image => Image Size and select the size that you want, making sure to lock the aspect ratio.
Go to File => Save for Web & Devices.
Set to “forever”
Select Gif and Save (Fig. 11)
Fig. 11 Saving the GIF
To view the animated gif, open it with your browser.
I’m looking forward to doing some more of these animations and have lots of ideas for future shoots! If you have tried it, please share by posting a link in the comments section.
I love the art of Sylvia Ji and was inspired by her Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) paintings. We had an amazing team for this shoot – everything came together to create some very cool images. The overall theme was “death” but I wanted to combine Winter – which is symbolically associated with death – with Day of the Dead, sugar skull inspired imagery. Jenny did a fantastic job with the makeup, and Dani and Candice were awesome with the hair styling. Dani’s styling was perfect and Charity was beautiful and inspired
I chose “Gone With the Storm” by One Dice as the music to accompany the video slideshow, which fits perfectly with haunting vocals and strings and cold, icy piano!
Celina Prado is a fashion design student at LaSalle College who worked with me on a fashion shoot, along with makeup artist Jennifer Ruth and model Charity. We did two pop fashion and two futuristic fashion looks. Here are the pop fashion photos.
The first look featured a satin metallic dress with turquoise accessories and blue heels. Click here to see more photos of this look.
For the second look, Charity wore bright pop art colours – a coral tank top and blue tights, with a Jessica Simpson Havana tote.
It was awesome working with this team! I have worked with Jennifer Ruth for several shoots and her work is superb. I have also worked with Charity previously and hope to do so again in the future. This was my first shoot with Celina, but hopefully we will also team up again soon.
My next post will be about the two futuristic fashion looks that we shot the same day. Here’s the link for the futuristic fashion sets.
In this video I show you how I do basic retouching on a beauty portrait, including cleaning up blemishes on the skin, removing stray hairs, brightening up the eyes, retouching lipstick and smoothing the skin using Adobe Lightroom 3.2 and Photoshop CS4. The final image is still very natural looking and does not look like it has been significantly altered.
Here’s a video slideshow with images from a glamour portrait photography session with Jennifer Ruth and Kaitlin Sullivan. (Click here to see the video if you are using an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad). I met Jennifer at the Twisted Fairytale fashion show in March 2010 and loved her makeup work. Since we were both building our portfolios, we collaborated on a project with the beautiful and talented Vancouver model Kaitlin Sullivan. Jennifer did amazing work with the makeup, hair and styling for six different looks during the session. I did the shoot in the studio using basic portrait lighting setups to showcase the makeup and hairstyling.
For the first set Jennifer gave Kaitlin big pink feathered lashes, wet glittery pink lips and curly hair, with a pink feather boa and a chunky jeweled bracelet. Quite a glamourous look!
I used White Lightning strobes – the main light was an X800 equipped with a beauty dish. I love the light from the beauty dish – it is largish white reflector so the light is pretty soft, but it has some shadow definition that helps give more shape to the face. I used a white foam core reflector panel, as well as a reflector disk to fill in the shadows.
I normally use a lower power main light for portraits so that it does not interfere with the background lighting. I meter everything using a Sekonic Flash Master L-358, starting with the main light. The White Lightnings are great to use because I can easily fine tune the output. I used an X3200 with softbox for the hair light, located camera right, behind Kaitlin. I use a more powerful strobe mainly because the distance is further, but also it gives me the opportunity to increase the brightness of the side light or hair light to give more intense highlights. For a natural look, the hair light was adjusted to about a stop or so brighter than the beauty dish. The background was storm grey seamless paper (medium grey), with a gridded X1600 for a back burst. To meter the background, I used the reflected light attachment for the Sekonic and adjusted the light to give a gradient with the brightest part about a stop to a stop-and-half brighter than the main light. I used barndoors on the X1600 to control the light spill away from Kaitlin. I also used a hair fan for some of the shots, which you can see in the video.
One of the difficulties with large feathered lashes is the shadows that they cast over the eyes. Usually I like to get sparkling highlights on the eyes to give the portrait more life. With large lashes, I watch the highlights very carefully to make sure the eyes are not too dark. Another option is to have the model look down to show off the lashes.
The strobes were triggered using CyberSyncs. My camera is an Olympus E-510, and I used Olympus Studio 2 to tether the camera to my MacBook, I used Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS4 for the post-processing. I will be posting more information on post-processing in future blog posts.
Here’s a diagram of the basic set-up. Thanks to Kevin Kertz Photography for creating the template. It’s awesome and free!
Glamour portrait studio lighting
In the second set, Jennifer used silver feathered lashes, silver lipstick and a hot pink bob wig for Kaitlin. For accessories, we had a black feather boa, diamond costume jewelry and huge ring with black beads. Kaitlin was lying down on a white faux fur for these shots. Other than lowering the lights, the setup was the same as the first set. I also took some of the shots from above using a ladder.
"Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" Olympus 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens, 1/160 sec at f/11
Jennifer totally switched up the look this time, with a long black wig, metallic blue lips, and copper eye shadow. We had a blue ostrich feather, a rhinestone owl ring with blue and amber gems to match the makeup. This set was shot using natural light against the grey seamless background paper, which was lit with a gridded X800 and blue gel to complement the lips. The studio has loading bay door, so we opened it up and shot using the daylight. The light was not super bright, so I used ISO 200 and a fast prime lens - Sigma 30 mm f/1.4. I love the shallow depth of field of the wide aperture, but was careful to make sure that Kaitlin’s eyes were in focus. The large light source coming from the open garage door was beautiful and soft. We did have quite an audience gathered at the loading bay watching with great interest!
Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens, 1/125 sec, f/2.2 ISO 200
For the next set, Jennifer created a beautiful look with gold lips with blue eyes gradually shaded to gold, perfectly matching the colourful gems in Kaitlin’s earrings. I used a large softbox for the main light, and another large softbox behind Kaitlin, camera right. The background was lit with a gridded strobe to give soft gradient effect. I often use my 50-200mm zoom lens for portraits because it doesn’t distort the face as much as a wider angle lens does. The Olympus Zuiko 50-200mm zoom is awesome – tack sharp with a wonderful depth of field at wider apertures. The only drawback for using it in the studio is I have to go quite far away from the model. On the other hand, not being right in her face gives an opportunity for different expressions, depending on the model. I like to mix it up and I’m always switching the lenses during the shoot!
"Dreaming in Colour" Olympus 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 lens zoomed to 108mm, 1/160 sec at f/10
For the next set, Kaitlin’s makeup featured pink and purple with a hint of gold. I used the same lighting setup as the previous set, except with two gels on the background light – blue and red – to get a purple to match the makeup and necklace. I used o have a purple gel but it melted down a few months ago in an unfortunate accident! Kaitlin was sitting in a large circular chair with a black cushion for these photos. I like to have the model stand, sit, lie down, or move around, even when just doing headshots, to get a variety of looks.
"She's Got the Look" Olympus 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 at 50mm, 1/160 sec at f/9.0
The final set was done with the Kaitlin’s hair in an updo and I used the same lighting setup.
"Beautiful Eyes" Olympus Zuiko 50-200mm f/3.5-2.8 lens at 54mm, 1/160 sec at f/9.0
The photography session was very successful – we all got some great images for our portfolios, and it was a pleasure to work with both Jennifer and Kaitlin. Jennifer is amazingly creative and super-organized, which allowed us to get six different awesome beauty looks. Kaitlin was also amazing and I expect to see more of her in the future! She is perfect in front of the camera – easy to direct with lots of creative posing ideas. I hope to have the opportunity to work with them both again in the future.
Here’s a video slideshow with images from a shoot with model and hairstylist Candy and makeup artist Kristina Capati. Click here to see the video on your iPhone/iPod Touch or iPad. Candy is great to work with and puts a lot of intensity into her modeling. Click here to view some of my previous shoots with Candy. This was my first time working with Kristina. I did another shoot with Kristina as both model and makeup artist and will post some images from that shoot later. Kristina was awesome to work with and I look forward to doing more shoots with her in the future!
